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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series on organized crime worldwide.

Italy is as famous for organized crime as it is for its cuisine. The main organized criminal groups in Italy are dominated by powerful families and alliances associated with specific regions. Despite the unending competition between families and alliances that hampers their reach, the phenomenon of organized crime in Italy will persist.

Organized Crime Emerges

The phenomenon of organized crime in Italy began on the island of Sicily. This strategically placed island in the Mediterranean Sea has been ruled by dozens of different invading armies for millennia. The island’s position makes it an excellent naval and trading station. Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans and Spaniards (among many others) have all ruled the island, fighting for control of its well-protected harbors and ignoring the plight of its citizens.

During Sicily’s existence under foreign rule, a system of local protection and security emerged, giving rise to a caste of middlemen who operated farms and controlled agricultural output on behalf of absent, foreign land owners. Without supervision, these middlemen became the law enforcers in Sicily, favoring their own style of business and justice over that of the state and the land owners. They were not shy about using violence to impose their will and shotguns were the weapon of choice. Eventually, landowners became irrelevant and retained little actual control over their Sicilian farms. The ruling power of the day would occasionally crack down on the feudalistic system these middlemen had imposed. But as always, Sicily’s main importance to foreign occupiers was as a naval hub in the Mediterranean, not as an agricultural producer. After years of disinterested, foreign rule, Sicilians built up distrust for state authority, preferring to do things their own way — which often included violence and illicit economic activity that evolved into Sicilian organized crime.

Hence the rise of organized crime, an institution largely left alone until the 1920s when Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini attempted with some success to eradicate it on the island. By the 1940s, many Sicilian organized criminals had either fled or were dead. Others escaped to the United States, where they built criminal empires along the East Coast and in Chicago. The end of World War II brought renewed opportunities for organized crime in Sicily.

In the face of global war, the threat of organized crime lost significance. In fact, the Allied forces were aided by underground organized crime members when they landed in Sicily in 1943. After the invasion, the Allies placed Sicilian organized criminals in positions of power. By the end of the war, organized criminals were the only substantial social force without ties to communists or fascists. As a result, they reasserted their social dominance over Sicily. Trade in weapons and drugs and extortion subsequently flourished.

As the Italian government formed ties with the Soviet Union, and Italian-U.S. relations froze, organized criminals used their positions in Sicily to influence the national government by supporting Christian Democrats — the pro-Western party that countered communism in Italy. Despite the violence in Sicily, the threat of communism ensured the survival and spread of Sicilian organized crime through its support for the Christian Democrats.

What was once a loosely grouped cultural phenomenon evolved into a cohesive faction known as La Cosa Nostra (LCN) once political support and a solid drug trade was established in Sicily. But internal struggles for power between rival families in 1962 resulted in what has been called the First Mafia War, a violent six-month clash sparked when a prominent LCN boss was killed by the Corleone family over a heroin shipment dispute. The war ended when a bomb ordered by the Corleone family targeting a rival boss missed its target and killed seven police officers instead, prompting the national government to intervene and arrest more than 1,000 LCN members. The crackdown proved half-hearted, however, and eventually the LCN was restored under new leadership again dominated by the Corleone family until the Second Mafia war in 1981.

The second conflict proved more violent, producing 200 confirmed dead and countless disappearances (LCN commonly used barrels of acid to dispose of bodies). Ultimately, the Corleone family emerged victorious and strengthened their hold on the lucrative cocaine and heroin trades. Again, violence brought a government crackdown and the biggest anti-mafia trial in Italian history. A prominent LCN member turned state’s witness, Tomasso Buscetta, provided valuable testimony on the group. His cooperation, along with years of bank transactions, wiretaps and forensics, helped convict 360 members in the famous “Maxi Trials” of 1987. Meanwhile, the fall of European communism weakened LCN’s political connections with the Christian Democrats.

In 1989, the Italian Communist Party disbanded, and the Christian Democrats followed suit. Shortly thereafter, in 1992, LCN assassinated two top state prosecutors closely involved in the Maxi Trials in an attempt to end the government’s campaign against their organization. But the killings led to more trials and the arrest of LCN’s most violent boss, Toto Riina. The damages LCN sustained in the early 1990s cut deeply into its operations.

Criminality in Italy, however, continued. After the prosperous years of the 1960s and 1970s, internal wars over control of Sicilian organized crime created opportunities for other southern Italian organized crime groups like the Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita and La Stidda to expand. Another family-based operation with a similar background to the Sicilians known as the Camorra, — centered in Campania, the region surrounding Naples — filled the vacuum left by LCN. By 2004, the Camorra dominated the cocaine and heroin trade in Europe. But success brought competition, and a three-month war between rival members of the group ensued during the winter of 2004 and early 2005 over territories and distribution networks. The battle left hundreds dead. Eventually, the police intervened and many top bosses and influential members of Camorra were either killed or arrested.

Currently, the top Italian criminal organizations are the less known and more secretive ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria and La Stidda from Sicily.

In a rare example of a dispute conducted openly and outside Italy, in August 2007, the ‘Ndrangheta killed six Italians in the German city of Duisburg as part of an inter-family feud. Later that year, police arrested a mayor and several of his deputies in a Calabrian town for collaborating with the organization.

Meanwhile, La Stidda has also faced arrests. Their identity was revealed to the public only in the 1980s. It is believed they consist of LCN members that left during that time. For now the group operates in south and east Sicily — LCN operated in the north and west, primarily around Palermo. La Stidda has only begun and it is unclear whether they have entered the drug trade — a lucrative facet of Italian organized crime determining who the real powerbrokers are. Like the ‘Ndrangheta, La Stidda is worth watching as it faces a double threat; competing for territory with LCN (despite its drop in power, it still controls large swaths of Sicily) and eluding a smarter, less corrupt police force. Whether the ‘Ndrangheta and La Stidda can retain a low-profile and avoid the mistakes that afflicted the LCN and Camorra remains to be seen.

Geography and Organized Crime

As indicated, the most important aspect of Sicilian geography is its location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. The coastal areas in the south and east are flat and ideal for cities and harbors, while northern Sicily is rugged and mountainous, providing insulation for the island’s historically agricultural-based natives. The traditional centers of Italian organized crime are located in the north of Sicily, in towns like Palermo, Corleone and Nicosia. La Stidda, in comparison, has begun to set up shop in the south and east of the island, focusing on Gela.

Finished products rarely have ended or begun in Sicily, but the island has served as a transshipment point for raw materials from Africa and the Middle East on their way to bigger markets. Organized crime families treat Sicily in the same manner: While more money can be made on the island today thanks to government injections of capital, the big markets lie elsewhere. Friendly port operators in Sicily (either on the organized crime payroll or owned by them outright) handle cocaine and marijuana traffic from Latin America, heroin traffic from Asia and arms traffic from Southeastern Europe and Russia. Only a fraction of these goods stay in Sicily; the bulk go on to Spain, France, Germany, the United States and (in the case of weapons) Africa and the Middle East.

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